Music filled with this much pain shouldn’t feel so radiant. After more than a decade toiling away in East Coast punk bands and working odd construction jobs, 2023’s Greg Mendez was both a reinvention and a breakout for the songwriter behind it. That album’s creation, now a heavyweight presence in Philadelphia’s DIY lore, began after Mendez suffered a worksite concussion and used his workers’ comp to record a collection of woozy and warm folk songs. Greg Mendez became a dark-horse AOTY contender, anchored by “Maria,” an astonishing song about escaping through the bathroom window of a crack den. The record earned Mendez a deal with Dead Oceans, and his first LP for the label is full of sideways humor and strange, matter-of-fact observations. Like Shugo Tokumaru’s junk drawer orchestras, Mendez threads xylophones, music boxes, omichord, tape loops, dusty pianos, and chintzy organs through all twenty-six minutes.
The creaking melody machine that suddenly appears halfway through opener “I Wanna Feel Pretty” is a rare beauty. The percussion sounds like bare feet slapping down a wooden hallway, cushioned by Wurlitzer chords, clapping hands, and a ramshackle xylophone. The song is a laundry list of escalating bummers. “I got a new job and it’s not too sweet / Last night I got robbed as I walked through the streets / At a quarter til three / When no one’s around except someone like me,” Mendez sighs over a jangling guitar line that stumbles down the stairs. Comparisons to Elliott Smith are inevitable; like Smith, Mendez has an ear for smart melodies and subtly angular vocal phrasing. Try singing along to “Looking Out Your Window” and you’ll see just how many vocal acrobatics he does in a single verse. Mendez also leans into a falsetto, balancing on the edge between his head and chest voice, cooing like melting ice ready to crack apart.
Beauty Land lingers on disturbingly candid moments of weakness. Mendez regrets not visiting his Aunt Mary “before she went away,” straining through the line “Oh my God, I’m so happy that I looked away” while fingerstyle notes ripple beneath him. “Serving Drinks” details the arrival of an unexpected child, a baby brother whose “stupid little baby head is stealing all her love.” Uncomfortable as the sentiment is, it also reveals Mendez’s dry wit: “I’m serving drinks again to men who talk over their friends.” And when a lyric as good as “Dad’s been hiding out, he walks and talks like Jesus now” arrives, it’s hard not to imagine Ryan Davis somewhere punching at the air because he didn’t write it first.
Mendez often double-tracks his voice, creating a light-headed effect as out-of-sync Gregs drift in and out of the left and right channels. But on the stark “Sunsick,” it’s just him and his guitar trapped inside the small details that still haunt him. “Pulling all the shopping carts of love, stuffed with eggshells and seaweed,” he sings into the exhausted, weary air of Beauty Land around him. “Frog” introduces warbling, downtuned vocals and faded organ tones played completely straight. “Please forgive me for my faults,” Mendez repeats, his voice slurring while a higher harmony hovers above him like a cartoon cherub. Paired with “Sunsick,” we’re confronted with a portrait of a man who is terrified of fucking up again: “I pretend your garden’s filled with flowers, every morning they forgive me for the things I’ve done and the things I will become.” Even the ghosts of Mendez’s past seem to have left him.
The suffering in Beauty Land comes in pockets yet feels constant: nights spent on sidewalks, empty hospital rooms, morphine drips ticking like a metronome. On “Geranium,” Mendez takes a call from an old friend who needs twenty bucks for another score. Dopesick chills run through the record’s desolation, recalling Acetone’s hazy doom or Casiotone for the Painfully Alone’s twee despondency. Mendez’s music feels adjacent to Star Moles’ recent breakout, Highway to Hell. But while Emily Moales’ tales of Philadelphia are woven with mystical and mythological subtexts, Mendez deals only in absurdly bleak levels of directness, no matter how painful. And his concision is admirable: there’s not an ounce of fat on this album.
“No Evil” is a tangled mesh of A/B verse structures and nursery-rhyme cadence, as Mendez laments getting locked out of the house in his own head. He briefly soars on the line “I’m dancing and I’m crying until I can’t see no evil,” but the song’s second half turns into a failed purge. Mendez cannot rid himself of his demons. But still, in his quest for grace, a thrumming piano joins the cavernous chords of a post-rock guitar. It’s overwhelming, but never too loud; nothing on Beauty Land rises above a mezzo forte. Most bands would have expanded the back half of “No Evil” into a hypnotic jam. But restraint and repetition are Mendez’s superpowers, and together they strengthen all of his pleas.
The majesty and grief of penultimate track “So Mean” aren’t in conflict, nor do they stifle the momentum of Beauty Land’s gentle light. They live in peaceful coexistence. In an interview with Paste two years ago, Mendez said “the songs don’t really feel happy or anything. But I really love making them, and it brings me joy.” You can feel that joy again here, in the craft itself—from Mendez’s impossibly catchy hooks to the warmth ringing out of every guitar line. With Beauty Land, Greg Mendez has gone from being somebody influenced by decades of songwriter and slowcore greats to being in conversation with them. This album isn’t merely an acolyte of Either / Or, Pink Moon, or Carrie & Lowell. With enough time, we may start regarding it as a peer. [Dead Oceans]
Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Woodhouse.
